Saturday, October 05, 2013

The Louisville Courier-Journal is willing to smear a conservative radio talk show host by asserting that his actions were racially insensitive, but it is perfectly willing to accept money from the company that airs and promotes his show!

The Courier-Journal today ran an op-ed by Joe Gerth lamenting that someone named "Gary" called into the Leland Conway Show on WHAS and used what Gerth thought was a racial slur in reference to President Obama, after which point Conway quickly dispatched the caller and went on with his show, but didn't explicitly condemn the caller's (debatably) racist remark.

This, according to Gerth--that one caller called into a conservative talk show and used what might have been (but wasn't necessarily) a racial reference and who was basically cut off anyway--is evidence not only of continuing racism in larger society and a coarsening of political rhetoric, but of Conway's own racial insensitivity.

Seriously? This must be the first time Gerth ever listened to a radio talk show, since strange people call in all the time and say insensitive things and are cut off by hosts who just go on with the show.

But to Gerth, it was a racial incident calling for condemnation of Conway and his show.

But here's the funny thing: Take a look at the screen shot below. Notice anything interesting? Above the very article in which Conway's show is condemned is an advertisement for Conway's show!

This is priceless. If Conway's show is insensitive on racial issues, then why is the CJ accepting advertising money from it—to advertise the very show its writer condemns as racially insensitive?

Joe, are you going to call on your employer to cut its ties to WHAS and its advertising money?

5 comments:

LOL - fail at sports play-by-play, become extreme right wing talk show host. That's about the intellectual level we hear on Conway's show (embarrassingly enough, better than his incoherent replacement in Lexington).

What ever happened to interesting people like David Brudnoy? Now he was a good conservative talk show host.

'...those who are really troubled about it, they can always just watch the ape that’s in the White House...'

Yeah...that's clearly debatable. When a Kentuckian calls the President and ape, it is highly doubtful that is meant to be racist.

Let's remind us of the extreme lengths Martin goes to before making any kind of assumptions:

'Now I suppose someone could argue with my assumption that the reason for the inclusion of all the climate science emphasis in the standards is not due to the interest in climate change (and Bevins tries to do this), but that would be rather hard to believe.'

So when someone says 'weather' a few times in some science standards, it's really 'hard to believe' that that isn't part of a 'global warming manifesto'.

But someone calls in on a conservative radio show in Kentucky and refers to 'the ape in the White House'...well it 'might have been' a racial slur, but that's really 'debatable'.

'This is priceless. If Conway's show is insensitive on racial issues, then why is the CJ accepting advertising money from it—to advertise the very show its writer condemns as racially insensitive?'

Ok, so maybe you don't know how internet advertising works. Ad providers like Google place ads on websites automatically, based on the contant of that website. So, in this case, WHAS has paid for advertising on teh Courier-Journal website. Those advertisements are then placed automatically by an algorithm based on relevance. So an articles that is about WHAS is detected by the software and the ad is automatically placed above it.

The author of the article has no control over this.

Moreover, is it really fair and realistic to expect the Courier-Journal to cancel all WHAS advertising within a day or so of that incident? There may be a contract they have to let expire to avoid legal action on the part of WHAS.

But of course, all of this detailed stuff is secondary to the opportunity of taking a cheap shot.

Those who predicted a post racial America following Obama's election also knew nothing about Barack Obama. I do agree that the caller was being racist, but it doesn't follow that the host is racist because he didn't rise to high enough dudgeon in the opinion of a reporter whose newspaper offends me regularly.